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When we convene the Winter 2011 Seller Forum tomorrow morning in
New York, we’ll be joined by 50 top digital sales leaders all
seeking clarity and context for the very important decisions they
make every day. But given the complexity and
dynamism of the digital, media and advertising landscapes, we’re
not so much solving a puzzle as framing a set of mysteries.

When one solves a puzzle, accumulating data and drilling down to
firm answers is the way to go. But when it comes to framing
mysteries — the Middle East, economic trends, our world — it’s
really all about asking the right questions. So for public
consumption — and as a focal point for those at the Forum — here
are some of the questions that i hope will help light the path.

The Drift is proudly underwritten this week byPubMatic,which provides one
holistic selling platform to protect publishers and increase
their online and mobile ad sales.

As Linda Gridley offers her thinking on the crowded digital
landscape, I hope we’re asking “Beyond which companies are
going to win or lose, or which sectors rise or fall, what are the
underlying hard trends that will shape the landscape?
What’s causing all of this?”

As we debate the value and validity of ad verification, we should
ask “In embracing — or at least acquiescing — to
current verification demands, what genie might we be releasing
from its bottle? Are we really enabling greater spending or
applying a gloss of ‘truthiness’ to a flawed buying
process?”

As we host two top agency executives in a candid discussion, I
hope we’ll ask “Is there a dramatically different model for
the media company/agency relationship that we haven’t yet
considered? And what would it take for us to move beyond
platitudes about ‘partnership’ and really abolish the processes
and roles that serve neither of us?”

In the time we spend talking about the publisher’s response to
demands for audience buying, I think we should ponder the
question of “Is audience buying an innovation that brands are
screaming for, or is it fundamentally driven by the needs of the
agency for a more profitable transaction model?”

And as we entertain six innovative new companies that serve
publishers, I hope we’ll be thinking “What is the cost of one
more bit of complexity, one more alliance? And should we at
this point be thinking about fewer and deeper relationships vs.
‘one more interesting opportunity?’”

It’s likely there will be no firm or uniform answers to these
questions. But I think we’ll all be better sales leaders
and better business people for having asked them.